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March 05, 2014

I'm finishing up the next section of the imaginary reading list (see below), but in the meantime...

1. At Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse asks about disclosure policies: when you are discussing provocative/loaded/ideologically potent/etc. material, what do you say about your own positions? This really is one of those questions, as some of the commenters point out, for which the answer depends on any number of contingent factors--course level, topics, pedagogical method, student demographics, and so forth. My courses usually don't skew to the intensely political (OK, they pretty much don't skew that way at all, unless the text calls for it), but I do spend a lot of time a) talking about Christianity and b) expecting the students to take Christianity, and religion in general, seriously. To that end, I do disclose that I'm Jewish, for two reasons: 1) to assure students that I'm not proselytizing and 2) to model how to be serious about a belief system that isn't yours. (Before you say, "Um, you've got the most Jewish name, like, ever, so surely they've already guessed," I will point out that quite a few people in this region have never met a Jew that they're aware of--although there's a big Jewish community in the closest city of any size--and couldn't recognize a classically Ashkenazic name if they saw it dancing the hora while noshing on latkes. My Jewishness is absolutely not obvious to all of my students, or even the staff.)

2. Help, thetriggerwarningsdebate. The comments sections at various sites seem to be collapsing "triggering" material and "offensive" material, which may be the nature of the beast--material we often understand to be triggering is offensive or upsetting, but someone offended or upset is not necessarily triggered. Any university policy would have to disentangle the two. (The Oberlin policy, in the first link, does in fact try to define "trigger" so as to exclude "offended.") However, when I taught Pan's Labyrinth, I gave advance warning about a couple of specific scenes for students who might not be able to handle extremely graphic violence or gore (which is something I have a problem with myself--let's just say I'm not in the market to teach a course on horror films any time soon), and that pretty much was a trigger warning without the word "trigger" attached. Reading through the various posts, I find myself mostly coming down on the side of those who hold that it's not paternalistic to allowstudentsto make an informed decision about how they want to handle material that is not difficult, challenging, or offensive, but that instead genuinely causes them serious mental harm. It would be paternalistic to design a syllabus that had nothing that might be triggering on it (not so thrilled with Oberlin's direction there...), or to insist that there is only one way to experience and process trauma, or to force a student to accept what to them appears to be an inappropriate or relatively useless form of assistance. These issues are certainly something to be mindful of, whether or not there's a call for an official policy.

That being said, Tressie McMillan Cottom raises an important caveat:

Trigger warnings make sense on platforms where troubling information can be foisted upon you without prior knowledge, as in the case of retweets. Those platforms are in the business of messaging and amplification.

That is an odd business for higher education to be in…unless the business of higher education is now officially business.

Dr. Cottom's point, if I understand her correctly, is at least twofold: first, the trigger warning in social media contexts provides some semblance of an opt-out mechanism in an explicitly corporatized environment (no, thanks, I don't want to buy this horrific thing you're selling) that depends on material being disseminated as widely as possible by the user base. (Tumblr would be another good example.) Retweeting, reblogging, and favoriting can be performed critically (a favorite that is designed to mark a place rather than show approval, a retweet intended ironically, and so on), but they are often simple "thumbs up" votes--a moment of applause intended to spread opportunities for further applause. Which is, as she says, part of the business platform. But, second, we assume that the college student has opted in to exposure to potentially disturbing material--the purpose of an education is not to applaud, nor to favorite, nor to please, but, in large part, to challenge. The trigger warning is a "business" warning because it assumes that students can and should opt out when faced with distressing texts or other media; it prioritizes, as she says earlier, "the student-customer." Not least because "no one is arguing for trigger warnings in the routine spaces where symbolic and structural violence are acted on students at the margins." The spaces, that is, where there is no opt-out.

February 01, 2014

Here's the reading list for this year's upper-division Victorian poetry seminar. The course emphasizes narrative verse and dramatic monologues, although some sonnets sneak in (and, of course, a sonnet sequence). Before you say, "wait, why isn't X there," bear in mind that in the second half of the course, small groups of students will be contributing their own assignments to the syllabus; moreover, the course assignments encourage and/or require students to work with poems off the syllabus, so that they apply skills learned in class to works "uncontaminated" by yours truly. (I often use that last option on exams--asking them to read Assigned Text X against Related but Not Assigned Text Y.) I'm experimenting with a new assignment this semester: asking students to annotate a poem as if for classroom use (e.g., headnote, footnotes, glosses, links to useful stuff on the 'net...).

As you can see, the class starts with some basic scansion, beginning with "hey, you're an English major, this is iambic pentameter" before moving on. (Luckily, the students who have taken Shakespeare are ahead of the game.) We did one session of just reading aloud, which I encourage students to do as a matter of course.

I'm trying out Francis O'Gorman's anthology this semester. Normally, I use the big Broadview, but I haven't always been happy with the footnotes.

December 03, 2013

One of my Facebook friends sparked a discussion about teaching really, really terrible texts: how do you frame them for the students? What can you do with them? Do you offer your own opinion, or wait for the students to say "bleeaarrgggh"? As my long-standing (and -suffering) readers know, much of my time is spent reading books that are, shall we say, of problematic aesthetic value. But do I teach them?

I'm not a fan of over-arching generalizations (who is?), so let's just say that "it depends." More specifically: it depends on the level and subject matter of the course. My usual mantra is that students in introductory courses should be exposed to major works in the relevant literary tradition; that students in upper-division courses should have the opportunity to explore less familiar works (the "canon-busting," if you like); and that graduate students should be offered a cross-section of all the works necessary to understand the topic at hand, no matter how aesthetically pleasing or displeasing they are. Thus, British Literature II tends to be about the Romantic Big Six, the major Victorian poets, and so on, whereas more advanced Gothic courses will inflict feature Eliza Parsons or James Malcolm Rymer in addition to the more palatable Mary Shelley or J. S. Le Fanu.

In this semester's Judaism & the 19th c. British Novel graduate seminar, I taught two pretty awful works, Osborn W. Trenery Heighway's Leila Ada and Mrs. E. A. Germains' Left to Starve, and No One Wants the Blame--the former as an example of the conversion narrative, the latter as a Jewish reworking of Daniel Deronda (alongside Amy Levy's more sophisticated, but also more ambivalent, Reuben Sachs). I did warn students that some folks still take Leila Ada seriously, despite Heighway's unfortunate track record (his Royal Literary Fund application reveals that he was sued by a former publisher--successfully--for faking a different, Christian "life"), and the ones who Googled were left...agog...by the results. In any event, with Leila Ada, once I got the "ack, this is bad" out of the way--and I'm usually upfront about the "ack, this is bad" factor--I had them itemize all the genres and modes at work in the narrative. One (of many...) of the bizarre things about the narrative is just how many different genres/modes it cycles through, from the Gothic to travelogue to (obviously) conversion narrative to sentimentalism to...you name it. Once we had something productive to say about how the book worked, we could have a serious discussion about how it used different strategies to narrate the conversion experience. Similarly, with Left to Starve, the students and I charted all the Daniel Deronda parallels and ripostes, which opened up a route, again, for us to think about what the book was doing (positive) as opposed to how bad it was (negative). In general, I try to get students to turn "this is bad/this is boring" responses around--OK, what is the book doing that doesn't work for me? Is it trying and failing to engage with a problem, either content- or form-wise? Do I and the author have radically different priorities, and if so, what?

November 19, 2013

Over at IHE, Jeanne Zaino asks if "[i]t may be time to re-think our outright rejection of appropriation and at least begin a broader discussion about (a) whether there are real differences between plagiarism and appropriation? (b) if so, what are they? (c) under what circumstances may the later be used properly? and most importantly (d) how can we begin to begin to address these issues pedagogically?" At this point, there is actually a considerable body of work about a-d, thanks to appropriation's close relationship to adaptation--itself rather extensively theorized by now (see, e.g., Linda Hutcheon). For most instructors, the sticking point in letting appropriation and plagiarism slide into one another will derive from the assumed self-reflexivity of the former term. Besides "affect[ing] a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain," as Julie Sanders argues, appropriations may "highlight troubling gaps, absences, and silences within the canonical texts to which they refer" (26, 98). Appropriations, that is, call attention to how they radically rewrite their source materials, as when Jane Smiley makes King Lear's "villainous" daughters into the protagonists of A Thousand Acres. Young Jean Lee takes this process a step further in her Lear, which not only jettisons Lear himself, but also intercuts her own characters' reflections on loss and mortality with excerpts from King Lear and material lifted directly from Sesame Street's famous episode about the death of Mr. Hooper--an act that asks us to think about, among other things, our understanding of Shakespeare's "originality."

Appropriation, then, normally does not say "all this material is mine," whereas plagiarism asserts its originality in the act of theft. When Scott G. F. Bailey rewrites Hamlet in his clever The Astrologer, he expects the reader to notice both the parallels (hey, that Vibeke character sounds awfully like Ophelia!) and the subversions (the Hamlet-figure is, shall we say, somewhat less admirable than his model). By contrast, the student who hands in a paper cobbled together from multiple websites may indeed be reworking arguments, if only by accident, but the paper's success demands that the instructor not notice and/or not know how to use Google. Moreover, the plagiarist, when quizzed, may often be unable to explain "their" argument, whereas the appropriator self-consciously puts his or her work into conversation with another. In appropriation, the argument emerges from one creator's engagement with another; in plagiarism, the "creator" does an end-run around the engagement, and hopes that the audience will do likewise.

Now, does appropriation work in, say, a literary-critical context? Both Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey are famous and much-discussed1 acts of theoretical appropriation, making Harold Bloom go where he had never gone before (and significantly revising his work in the process). Granted, Gilbert, Gubar, and Gates appropriate using the forms of academic scholarship--the footnotes, the explicit discussions of the source material, and so forth. But they're still appropriating Bloom, not simply applying him. In theory, students could be asked to do an equivalent exercise, although it requires a lot more knowledge and theoretical savvy to carry it off than they likely possess. But nobody would call such appropriation "plagiarism."

October 11, 2013

This essay on common final examinations as a means of teacher evaluation sounds good...up to a point. The point being when the subject under examination is not in mathematics or many of the science fields. In practice, most humanities courses have considerably more leeway in terms of content than a course in developmental algebra; to use an example from a recent discussion in my own department, a student who has taken intro to lit analysis with me should be able to tell the difference between a Shakespearean and a Petrarchan sonnet, but not every instructor builds basic poetic genres into the course. For that matter, not every instructor requires exams for this course (some prefer to use papers). And because this is the only course which could plausibly use a common exam to evaluate instructional quality--except for composition courses and the capstone seminar, we rarely run multiple sections of anything--we would have to standardize readings and technical content first. Or, I suppose, do essay exams (no objective section or short answers) asking students to close-read texts that they had never seen before. That's perfectly doable--I often ask students to demonstrate that they can transfer skills by giving them something new to work on--but again, if you haven't standardized the technical content, some students will still be more or less disadvantaged. The real pushback in the humanities would likely come from faculty who don't feel like having the contents of their courses dictated from on high (and certainly everything I've heard from instructors in such situations suggests that it's not much fun, to say the least!), not necessarily from faculty objecting to "evaluation."

September 25, 2013

Many years ago, I was teaching The Tempest to some freshmen. A few of them complained that they couldn't "relate" to the play. At which point, I wanted to jump on the nearest desk and yell that THERE WAS NO POSSIBLE REASON ON THIS GREEN EARTH THAT THEY SHOULD "RELATE" TO THE TEMPEST. It's The Tempest, for crying out loud, not a docudrama about being a college student in upstate NY. Which brings me around to the novelist DavidGilmour, who doesn't teach women writers because "I’m very keen on people’s lives who resemble mine because I understand those lives and I can feel passionately about them – and I teach best when I teach subjects that I’m passionate about." Indeed, when asked if he needs to "relate" to the works on his syllabus, he explains that "I believe that if you want to teach the way I want to teach, you have to be able to feel this stuff in your bones. Other teachers don’t, but I don’t think other teachers necessarily teach with the same degree of commitment and passion that I do – I don’t know." Putting aside the not so passive-aggressive critique of those "other teachers" out there, the ones who don't "feel this stuff," this account of what it means to invest in "people's lives who resemble mine" seems to skip a few steps.

So, as those of you who have been putting up with this here blog for nearly a decade know well, I write about Christians. Thanks to demographics, I also teach Christians. (Because it's pretty hard to be a Victorianist and get away from Christians. Even the agnostics and atheists are still thinking in Christian terms.) Even this semester, when I'm teaching a course about Judaism in the 19th-c. novel, I've still got a whole lot of Christians going on. Now, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm Jewish (the name does tend to be a giveaway, I find). And yet, I get all excited and intense about "my" Christian novelists (despite their frequent lack of, er, aesthetic flair), and I suspect that one of my colleagues may have regretted asking why I thought Bleak House was one of the great English novels of the nineteenth century (let's just say "expounded at some length and with much gesticulation"). But my life most emphatically does not "resemble" that of any Victorian novelist I can think of--in fact, my life doesn't resemble that of any nineteenth-century Jews, male or female.

"Relate" and "resemble" posit that the objects of relation or resemblance are static, objective categories. Take, for example, "I relate to George Eliot," or "my life resembles George Eliot's." What does that mean? That you have a longterm liaison with a man who cannot divorce his wife? That you are a successful intellectual with no "respectable" female friends, a moral arbiter considered immoral by much of the genteel world at large? That you write great novels? That you're actually kind of conservative? That you read everything in sight? All of the above? What? Or have you imagined a relation or resemblance into being, a spark of connection that has something, perhaps, to do with Eliot, but just as much with what you needed to find in Eliot? And if you grant that, then perhaps you can grant that there are other ways of thinking about one's "relation" to a work or author that do not rely on mental mirrors in order to work?

For many academics,much of the "passion" is about the non-resemblance, the non-relation. Even those who may be like me are not, necessarily, like me. (I don't think I have much in common with Amy Levy, let alone Grace Aguilar.) Even recovery work still derives from an awareness of the strange: I can enter into figurative dialogue with that "lost" Jewish woman novelist, now found again, but I cannot flatten her circumstances and mine together into an indistinguishable pulp. Historical continuity does not necessarily encompass identity or more than token resemblance. I have nothing in common with Charles Dickens, and could really do without his antisemitism. But I could go on all day about Bleak House...and teach it all day, too. The space between myself and a work has just as much passion and promise, it seems to me, as does any comforting relation.

September 13, 2013

I grew up observing Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt, who published at R1 rates while working at CSU Los Angeles, a campus where faculty carry a twelve-hour teaching load. As a result, I always assumed that the answer to that question was, well, why not? (At the very least, I learned to look askance at assumptions that such things were impossible.) Since then, I've spent 99% of my career at a comprehensive, where I have a nine-hour load. And, as my CV suggests, I've not had much difficulty when it comes to publishing, either. Still, some faculty at R1s have expressed shock/disbelief/bemusement that I seem to be writing quite so much.

The question, then, is: under what conditions does a tenure-track academic at a teaching institution also have an active research program?

As Hollis Phelps points out in the linked article, a teaching institution potentially offers one undeniable benefit: "a great deal of flexibility and self-determination regarding where and what I publish." Publish something, and everyone says, "yay!" Nobody scrutinizes your work to see that you have cited the Approved Sources; nobody cares if you decide, like one of my former colleagues, to change your research specialization from Renaissance literature to the Ancient Near East. (Granted, that's a bit drastic.) If, like yours truly, you found yourself attracted to a subject whose attractions are, I have been given to understand, not always immediately understandable, then you're still fine. (On the one hand, people are reading and citing my work; on the other, I have not yet detected a critical mass of scholars who yearn to specialize in not-always-aesthetically-pleasing Victorian religious fiction, although there are certainly more of us than before.)

That being said, most faculty who maintain active research profiles at teaching institutions also enjoy certain conditions:

There are books nearby. DtEHoGRE's home institution and actual home are within easy reach (OK, barring Southern CA traffic jams) of UCLA, UC Irvine, USC, and the Huntington Library. This is a dicier proposition for yours truly--the closest research library is the U of Rochester, which is not that big, and it's approximately 100 miles to Cornell--which means that I have a habit of scheduling vacations in the immediate vicinity of places with books in them, buying the books myself, or pestering ILL. However, lots of my research involves books accessible via the Holy Trinity of GoogleBooks, Archive.org, and HathiTrust, which helps immensely, and our library has also stepped up its eBook access.

There is at least some institutional support. We do have small travel grants, which at least cover airfare, and the campus rewards research with merit bonuses; there are also some bigger grants available on the basis of where you are in your career. Moreover, everyone supports faculty who have a research agenda. By contrast, I have met faculty who teach at places where research receives no acknowledgment whatsoever, or is even positively discouraged. (Many years ago, someone who teaches at a well-known SLAC told me a story about being attacked at his tenure review because he published actively.)

Committee work is not a graveyard. That should be self-explanatory.

Faculty-student ratio. During the semester/quarter, a nine- or twelve-hour load will occupy most of your time: there are lectures to prep, papers to grade, works to reread, students to meet. (Oh, and there are also endless committees to sit on.) Some of this can be ameliorated by relatively small class sizes, however.

Ability to carve out time. Phelps identifies "time management" as key, and there's absolutely no way around this: at a certain point, you have to decide to prioritize some things and not others. This may mean that there's no television in your life (hi), or that you take vacations near libraries (see above), or that you get up early in the morning/stay up late at night, every morning/every night. (The flip side of this is, again, that there's much less pressure to perform, and different standards for what constitutes a research program.) However...

...Cooperative family/spouse/SO. For this to work, everyone has to be on board, and many faculty will have necessary personal obligations on top of teaching that rightly override pursuing research. Babies, household maintenance, frail parents... (I'll add that being a singleton has its own set of problems in this situation, as I can't divide up the cooking, housework, maintenance, and geriatric cat care. This means that things just don't get done sometimes--well, aside from the geriatric cat care, as I'd be meowed at pretty harshly if I didn't keep the cats fed.) The cliche about "only so many hours" applies.

Choice of topic. Early on, my father advised me that at this type of institution, it was essential to find research topics that were actually doable under a lot of time constraints. Scholars who successfully meld working at a teaching institution with active publishing are frequently one-author specialists (e.g., a former colleague who wrote about William Beckford) or specialists in areas not occupied by a lot of other academics (hey there!); alternately, they become generalists or popularizers (e.g., the late Paul Zall). Moreover, there's much more room for textbook writing, as one of the commenters on Phelps' article points out, a field that has the distinction of, you know, occasionally turning a profit.

I've occasionally been asked if being at a non-R1 is professionally disadvantageous when it comes to scholarship. For the purposes of publishing, the answer seems to be "no" (just look at the affiliations listed in many book catalogs, even from prestigious publishers); for the purposes of grant acquisition, the anecdotal answer appears to be "sometimes"; for the purposes of networking, also "sometimes" (although I've only been snubbed to my face once on account of where I teach, thank goodness).

September 11, 2013

Between classes, I shelled out $5 to read the whole thing (abstract here), as they say.

The primary difficulty with this study is that it's not possible to extrapolate anything useful from it. To begin with, the title is "Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers?"; the study actually asks "Are Tenure Track Professors at Northwestern University Better Teachers at the Lower-Division Level?" (Answer: No.) I'm reminded of the joke about the book that starts out big in the main title, then turns into a hyper-specialized monograph after the colon--only here, there's no colon. As even the authors admit, "Northwestern University is one of the most selective and highly-ranked research universities in the world" (16), with predictable results both for the kind of students it serves (a mediocre student at NW may not be a mediocre student elsewhere) and the kind of non-TT faculty it hires. Northwestern is...Northwestern. One might expect similar outcomes from a study done at Harvard or Yale. Moreover, Northwestern's location not only makes it easy for the university to take its pick of Ph.D.s, ABDs, and MAs from other high-ranking research universities, like the University of Chicago, but also gives it access to a wide range of active professionals in other fields (business, the arts) who may adjunct as a sideline. It's not immediately clear to me that Rural Minor Branch Campus, lacking these amenities and with a very limited non-TT pool, will experience quite the same effects.

Of course, that being said, in one respect the results aren't surprising at all, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Platonic qualities of TT faculty as teachers. Teaching lower-division courses, especially large-scale lectures, is its own unique skill set. Pitching the subject properly (and making it attractive), organizing lectures for clarity, knowing what can't be included, speaking effectively to a more impersonal (because larger) audience, even changing how one uses gestures and body language...all of these things require practice. And if non-TT faculty are doing most of the lower-division teaching--and, at Northwestern, apparently often doing so for years--then it should shock no-one that they also wind up doing better at it than Professor X, who rotates into the lecture once every three or four semesters and otherwise hangs out with upper-division/graduate students. (Historical example: one of UCLA's acknowledged all-time great teachers was Albert Hoxie, a lecturer with an MA who specialized in the gigantic Western Civ survey. You can hear some of Hoxie's lectures here.) Cinderella's Fairy Godmother does not show up, chant "Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo," and magically equip either TT or non-TT faculty with lower-division instructional skills. At the same time, non-TT faculty at Northwestern are also not performing under the same conditions as non-TT faculty at, say, Underpaying Community College or Budget-Crunched Comprehensive, given far better pay and greater continuity of employment.

September 07, 2013

1. What to do about the ritual of recommendation letters? The USA has a very particular (or peculiar, take your pick) letter-writing culture: it is unacceptable to say anything negative about the candidate or the candidate's project, unless there is something so sublimely awful that even the least delicate of souls would quail at the prospect of sharing a department with said individual. Even then, the negative observations are likely to be couched in dainty euphemisms, lest the candidate be sneaky and do an end-run around the confidentiality waiver. By contrast, letters from across the pond tend to be, shall we say, bracing in their judgments. ("Fascinating project! Utterly without merit from start to finish, but still, nice try.") Even helpful letters have to be carefully parsed: is this the standard-issue canonization letter, or genuine praise? In my experience of reading these things, I can think of very few instances in which a candidate's viability was materially affected by his/her letters of rec in either direction.

There's something to be said for the committee phoning instead of the recommender writing, despite the obvious logistical problems--you need to get two (or, depending on your HR rules, three) people in the same place for about thirty minutes in order to run through a thorough script. However, the advantages are all on the side of the committee & the recommender, not the candidate: there's no way for graduate directors to vet the recs beforehand, no way to do the aforementioned sneaky end-run around the confidentiality waiver (which you shouldn't do! but people do it anyway!), and no way to recover if the professor waxes nostalgic about that time you led a discussion section while spinning a hula hoop and wearing purple-and-orange striped socks.

I think one can overstate the extent to which "famous name" recommendations are helpful--some famous names write consistently terrible/superficial recs. That being said, a candidate further along in his/her career should start acquiring letters from people not on their doctoral committee. (And update the letters: it does raise red flags if the letters are from, say, five or even ten years ago.)

I'm all in favor, however, of capping the number of rec letters at three.

2. Strange as it may seem, you should, in fact, come to class during the first week. Odd, I know. I have missed the first day of class twice in my career, both times because the relevant airport was under several feet of snow and I was trapped somewhere else (moral of the story: I return from winter break much earlier). But I'm reminded of the professor from my undergraduate days who had this unfortunate reputation for coming to class and announcing, "You know, I just don't feel like teaching today." Students: THANKS FOR BEING SO "PROFESSIONAL," AND WE'LL BE TAKING A VACATION NOW.

3. No, no, not the sex thing again. The LP has by now earned a reputation for being a cranky young fogey when it comes to the "why can't we have fun sexy-times with people half our ages" crew. Intellectual excitement does not necessarily equate to the excitement of other regions of the body, despite all the poetic sighs about academic "erotics." In any event, I'm baffled by the persistent belief that saying "no, no sexy-times with the students" means "you believe that all students are LITTLE INNOCENT BABIES, and must be protected from MEAN EVIL PROFESSORS, and isn't that infantilizing?!" Indicating the existence of a power imbalance does not mean that the person with the shorter stick is a child, let alone that the indicator is a rampaging Podsnapper. It means that the person with a shorter stick is likely to bear an unequal burden when the end is nigh and sexy-times have turned into recrimination-times. Some people have more institutional oomph than others, and that matters. Yes, this does mean that there are times when even those in the grips of Pure Twoo Luv may have to restrain themselves temporarily, because rules necessary to protect the general may conflict with the desires of the particular. But, as Louise Antony bluntly reminds us, most serial-student-sexers will never be officially reprimanded. Moreover, fun sexy-times do not occur in a vacuum; other students notice and wonder, sometimes correctly, about the concrete effects on their own prospects. If there's truly a grand passion, it can wait until the student has actually graduated, changed majors, or otherwise passed out from under the relevant faculty member's purview. It's called maturity and delayed gratification, both of which, I have been given to understand, are old-fashioned conservative values.

August 21, 2013

This is the reading list for the graduate seminar I'm teaching this seminar on "Judaism & 19th-C. British Fiction." The course is intended to give a cross-section of nineteenth-century writings about and by Jews, covering a range of attitudes from philosemitic to antisemitic (and Jews' responses to these positions), and addressing how Jews figure in a range of intersecting stories about identity (secular and religious), conversion, assimilation, and nationhood. Students were asked to come into class having read The Merchant of Venice, as the Shylock/Jessica relationship often lurks behind nineteenth-century representations of Jewish domesticity (and conversion). The course does not otherwise presuppose that students will know anything about Judaism (guess what the first session will be about?), although I don't think there's anything on the syllabus likely to provoke as many "huh? what?" responses as Jacob Gordin's The Jewish King Lear, which I taught last year. It will be interesting to see how the more didactic novels go over with the graduate students.